Painting, Modelling and Gaming

Monthly Archives: February 2013

For any people that have stuck with me for the previous 10 posts, thank you! 🙂

For anyone that hasn’t seen them yet… (psst… you should go read them!)

Anyway… for this weeks update I have continued working on the base and have begun painting the cockpit crew. I have also picked out some more detail on the mega bolter and given the main carapace armour another wash but I figured people may be bored of seeing the same bits each week, so I’ll give them a break.

After the sand had dried on the base I sprayed it black and then gave it a nice heavy drybrush of Bestial Brown and then a really heavy drybrush of Graveyard Earth. After that I decided to break away slightly from my normal basing routine – only slightly though – and I used the Citadel Dry paints Tyrant Skull and Praxeti White as light drybrushed highlights over the top.

The next step now is to pick out the base details like rocks, tank traps, weapons, the barrel as so on. I’ll also need to add some scorched and burnt static grass and I’m really undecided about whether to use water effects in the crater. I want to but I think I want to just to use water effects rather than because i really think it’s going to bring anything to the model.

As mentioned at the start of this post, I’ve made some progress on the titan crew. I’ve basecoated the two pilots with Eshin Grey for the suits and Sycorax Bronze for the helmets and that’s as far as they’ve got but I’ve done more work on the Princeps. His overcoat has been painted with Scab Red and then lightly washed with Carroburg Crimson. I’ve not done anything to the chest plate or boots yet, as most of the effort has gone on the face.

I’ve used a base of Dark Flesh on the face, followed by a very careful coat of Rakarth Flesh making sure I leave the recesses well alone and then highlighted the most pronounced areas with Pallid Wych Flesh. I wanted him to have a pasty not-seen-the-sun-for-six-months look about him and these colours fit the bill nicely. Just before writing this post I base coated the bionic eye with black and picked out the normal eye with a strip of white and a dot of black!

So many of you may, or may not have noticed that @VoxCaster has stopped appearing in your time line. Well that’s because you’ve been BLOCKED!

You’ve probably been blocked because of the Space Marine IP criticism for either tweeting to @VoxCaster or retweeting someone else’s tweet. Not that retweeting equals endorsement. Anyway you’re not alone.

I imagine the inquisitor managing the @VoxCaster account was exclaiming and clicking at the time; “heretic, heretic, lost to the warp, demon, nob… Ork nob even, heretic”

It doesn’t feel like I’ve done a great deal to be honest and I feel like I’ve got so much further to go but total time spend is about 25 hours or so at this point, so I guess that’s not too bad after all.

Good news. This week I have started the base! *waits for applause* Ok, ok, settle down now… grab a biscuit and allow me to explain.

I took my nice piece of ever so slightly misshapen MDF and collection of ‘bits’ ….

And then added some of this lovely scenic foam putty…

And I did this…

As the eagle eyed amongst you will notice, I have added some etched brass, some 40k plastics and bits from the 40k basing kit as well as some of the Forge World resin blocks that are part of the moulding process (I have a million of these since buiding this titan!) which are forming concrete tank traps! I have shamelessly borrowed this idea from fellow #warmonger @docbungle. If you are reading this and use Twitter, go and follow him immediately. Seriously. Do it now. This post will wait a few seconds. 🙂

All done? Ace!

The scenic foam was very easy to work with and I just got my hands involved to be honest and carefully made a little impact crater as well as avoiding the area when the titans feet will sit. I pretty much just pushed these bits and pieces into the foam whilst wet and let it set around them – it takes a while to do so and I left it all night.

The next day i set about adding some Stirland Mud, which if you’ve not used it before, is part of the Citadel Texture paint range. I don’t personally like it for miniature bases but it’s fantastic for adding depth and texture to scenery and let’s face it, this base is more like scenery than a standard mini base.

This took me a full two pots of Stirland Mud but I’ve happy with the results so far. After letting the first coat dry I’ve since added some more to help bulid up certain areas and remove unnatural looking areas. Next up for this will be a coat of thinned out PVA glue to seal it all in and then some patches of sand and small gravel. I should be able to do that for next weeks post.

Whilst I was waiting the many hours it took these coats of mud to dry I set about finishing off the Turbo Laser. I have done so! I have finally finished something! I’m so excited I could crap. I have digressed.

So… here it is:

I’m really pleased with how it’s turned out and I hope the rest of the model lives up to this. I’ve got what I think is a nice metallic effect with carefully chosen highlights using Ironbreaker and the bronze/golden bits of detail were painted with Tin bitz and then Runelord brass and then given a wash of Coelia Greenshade to remove some sheen and give a dirty copper feel. I think it’s worked but It’s hard to see in these photos.

I tried to add some very sharp highlights on the blue areas using the Citadel edge paint ‘Blue Horror’. Again this looks better in the flesh than the pictures but I’m happy with how it turned out. I am not really looking forward to using the same method on the main carapace as it’s going to be seriously hard work.

I added the last pic here to show the rusty streaks (not a euphemism for ‘skidmark’) on the top of the barrels. This was achieved effortlessly with AK Streaking Grime (012). This stuff is BRILLIANT. If you want to add tank grime or rusty streaks to anything, I can’t recommend it enough.

Are you tired of toiling away through your codex, breaking your lead pencil and scribbling out incorrect point calculations? Well ah ha…. there’s an app for that.

Lately me and my fellow Tykens Rift bloggers have been playing with Quartermaster and Battlescribe available on iOS.

Please Note: This review was done using iOS apps only. My experience of Android has left a nasty stain on my mattress. Cheap imitation operating systems are not a substitute for the real thing.

Anyway Apps, yes, so how does it work?

Templates

Firstly lets note that GW are not going to let any App be sold with their codex stats, costs and attributes built-in, so you’re going to have to put these in yourself. This really is quite easy to do but somewhat time-consuming. If you’re a Marine player I imagine you’re going to be inputting all day. But not to worry, there are plenty dark corners of the net that have templates for you.

As a responsible blogger I recommend that you only take the templates of codices you already have *looks at GW’s legal team while typing*.

The one thing that must be said about creating your list on Battlescribe is that it can only be done on the PC; shame I know. Quartermaster does win in this regard and works really well on the iPad.

Your Army’s

Once you’ve built your first army list you can save it and create many more. Over time you’ll have all sorts of balanced lists designed to defeat varying foes. The ease of which you can alter unit configurations also means you can tinker and improve your list after every game.

Adding Units

Adding units seems simple enough, each separated by unit type, HQ, Troop, Fast Attack etc. and even an additional section for Allies, so they’re keeping up with 6th Ed Rules.

What’s nice about Quartermaster is that they display costs for all total units below each unit type. So for example I can see that I’ve spent 372 pts on my HQ and that’s 36% of my army. If I think it looks noticeably unbalanced I can correct it. Something that doesn’t seem so obvious on paper.

Editing Units

The templates already allow you to set the rules for each unit. So when I choose my Fire Warriors, I already have a minimum number as specified in my codex and standard gear selected. Of course I can easily edit all this by adding a command to the unit or change weapons and adding grenades. I know right, excellent!

Even while adding weapons a little note at the bottom is telling me I can only take 3 items, which is great incase I forget. Not that it will deter the broken list players 😉

Each unit also comes with notes about special abilities so under some of my elites I can see Deep Strike or Infiltrate, also ‘Excellent’. That was said in my best Wayne’s World voice obviously.

Printing my List

Finally of course you can print out your finished list. The full print out comes with each models stats, weapons and unit costs, perfect. Although don’t expect the generated template to be pretty, its functional, it’s not going to win you the most well presented list prize at tournament.

Summary

So this isn’t all for free understandably; the full version for Quartermaster is £2.99. Alternatively you could try Battlescribe for free and then buy the full no advert version for £2.49.

Thoughts from Chris using Battlescribe: “Whilst it’s a great tool it does require you to use a PC to create the entire list, and from experience this takes a while. Whilst I’m fairly impressed, there are quite a few things to get your head round which may quickly put off anyone who is expecting something to work “out of the box” so to speak. After all the hard work and swearing it’s an immensely powerful little tool and very useful. It has already saved me hours with trying different list ideas, but still owes me a good few more back before the balance is restored.”

Neil: “I can’t (personally) recommend Quartermaster on a phone sized device because I find it too small but the iPad is great. Everything can be created, edited and saved in the app. No booting of PC required! 🙂 ”

Hopefully this has helped a few of you before splashing out on these apps.